Night Owl Cards

  You ever have one of those blogging days where you have a post picked out and you're going through the process of scanning/picture-taking, uploading and figuring out a title, and then something else pops up that you should really write about and then something ELSE pops up that you should really write about? Yeah, this post is going to be a bit of a mess.   So, several days ago I pulled out of a box the first beer stein I've ever received as a blogging present. It arrived from reader Bob, who goes by GOGOSOX60 in the comments.   That stein arrived with some random packs of 1986 Topps. But I'll talk about that later. And, yes, I know the binder shelf in the background is sagging. I'll talk about that later.         The stein commemorates the 1974 World Series between the Dodgers and the Oakland A's. Even without knowing who Danny Goodman is, you can tell it was created by the Dodgers. Goodman was the Dodgers' marketing/souvenir guru for 25 years and h...

I think I've figured out a temporary work-around with my temperamental scanner that will allow me to scan items until I can get a new one, or at least fix the current one. So you should be seeing freshly-scanned cards in the posts to come. But meanwhile, I'm taking advantage of a post by Shoebox Legends a week or so ago in which he cleared out his scan folder of images and magically created new content! I can't think of any more perfect time to create such a post than when your scanner is on the blink! Normally, I don't have a lot of leftover scans (I certainly don't have all the spare autographs and fancy stuff I saw in Fuji's "I Just Had These Lying Here" post). Pretty much everything that I scan winds up showing up on Night Owl Cards. But I managed to scare up a few images that will generate some words from me. Some of these pictures were dedicated to posts that never were, some never made a post I wrote. I guess they were cut for time ....

My story on John Wockenfuss appeared in the newspaper Sunday. I believe you can read it here . I don't think the paywall kicks in until after the first few articles. ... ... So, read it? Not all ballgames and butterflies, huh? We collectors like to romanticize our baseball players, but life doesn't care whether "John Wockenfuss" is fun to pronounce or that his batting stance was goofy. I knew that Wockenfuss had dementia before I even called to set up an interview. I was told it was in the early stages, but I didn't know exactly what I'd find. How successful would I be communicating with him? I've dealt with difficult interviews in the past. I once was assigned to interview a deaf person while in college. I tried to interview an elderly man living in Arkansas over the phone who had a hearing problem. That didn't work. Also, when trying to talk to a high school athlete, you never know what you'll get. Sometimes I'd listen to my re...

Over the weekend, I got a chance to express my inner Mike Oz and share some baseball cards with a former major league player. I'm working on a story for my paper that involves ex-player Johnny Wockenfuss, who is almost a cult figure with fans of a certain age (I am one) and especially fans of the Detroit Tigers during the '70s and '80s. I won't go into much detail -- at least not now -- because I'm still in the middle of working on it, have more gathering to go, and I get very protective of my stories while I'm in the middle of the process. Got to retain that exclusive, you know. But I will say that I was able to sit in the home of Wockenfuss, give him the cards that I have of him in my collection, and ask his opinion on them. Yeah, cool. Way cool. I have 17 cards of Wockenfuss ("you have a lot of them," my wife said, and I thought "if that's a lot, what is my Hideo Nomo collection?"). Wockenfuss remembered the cards -- ...